Incident-respondents are like superheroes. They get distress-calls at all times of the day, and they try their best to resolve the problem before the fire spreads. Like any superhero, they have skills and knowledge to attend to most issues they encounter. But just like other superheroes, they sometimes need allies to have their backs.

In this spirit, Zenduty allows incident responders to tag other “Responders” to incidents. They can do so to keep some people (who manage a specific service for example) in the loop, or just to get help on something they don’t have expertise on. Keeping services online is a team exercise, and asking teammates to pitch in when you can’t solve something yourself should be easy. The tagged responders get an alert for the incident according to their notification rules, and can come in and acknowledge/resolve the incident themselves. Read the documentation about responders here

This method of transparent, quick and effective collaboration can help your team resolve incidents faster and fix the problem for the long run. It makes post mortem simpler and effective, as the right stakeholders have been able to follow the incident while it was still occuring. Allowing your on-call engineers to add responders from the right teams is the smart move.

Vishwa Krishnakumar